LIVING WORLD

2008-01-05T19:03:00.000+08:00

Do seeds die when birds eat them?
When birds eat many small fruits, they also eat the seeds inside them. They digest the fruit, but the seeds usually survive and come out in the bird's droppings. The seeds can germinate and grow, with the droppings providing the fertiliser they need for a good start in life.

How do plants grow from cuttings?
When a storm breaks branches from willow trees growing by a river, these fall in the water, float downstream, and can get stuck in the bank. The broken-off branches may make roots in the mud and grow into new trees. Many plants can grow in this way, and gardeners use the process to 'take cutting' from plants.

The race to reproduce
On a forest floor in early summer, plants are busily reproducing - in a variety of ways. Wild strawberries develop flowers and grow 'mini-plant' on long stalks called runners. Ferns and mosses make spores on the undersides of their leaves, or in special containers called capsules. They are not as colourful as flowers, but they are still easy to see.

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2007-12-26T15:25:00.000+08:00

Seeds on the move
Seeds need to move away from the plant they came from, so that they can grow in a clear space with plenty of light. Some seeds travel on the wind, dandelion seeds, for instance, use 'parachutes' to travel, while sycamore seeds use 'propellers'. Other seeds have tiny hooks which attach to the fur of a passing animal (or to our trousers and sweaters) and get carried about in that way. Coconut seeds are covered with thick fibres, so that the seed floats, and they are carried by the sea from island to another. The liquid inside a coconut gives the young plant some fresh water, which it needs when it lands on a sandy beach and starts to grow.

Seeds young and old
Arctic lupin seeds trapped in the frozen ground have germinated almost 10 000 years after being shed. Living seeds have also been found in the tombs of ancient Egyptians. But willow seeds last only a few months.

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PLANTS REPRODUCE

2007-12-14T22:42:00.000+08:00

Plants have to reproduced, just as animals do. First of all, most develop flowers which are then fertilised or pollinated, to produce seeds. The seeds ripen, and are scattered far and wide, eventually growing into new plants. Ferns and mosses reproduce in a different way. They do not have flowers. Instead of making seeds, they make microscopic spores which drift through the air.

How are flowers pollinated?
Flowers contain male parts which produce a fine dust called pollen, and female parts which produce seeds when they receive pollen from another flower. Some plants rely on the wind to spread their pollen, but most use animals. Insects, birds and bats visit flowers to feed on their sugary nectar. As they travel from bloom to bloom, they carry pollen with them, pollinating or fertilising the flowers they visit.

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:flower pollinated

2007-12-05T02:11:00.000+08:00

All life depends on plants
Almost every living thing depends on plants for its food supply. Even the leopard and lion, which only eat meat, are actually feeding on plants, because that is what feeds their prey. In the same way, if you drink milk you are really consuming grass, there wold be no cows to give us milk. The grass turns the Sun's energy into food, the cow turns that energy into milk, and you use that energy to kick a football around, or dance or do homework. Even reading uses up some of that energy. The link from grass to cows to humans, or from grass to antelope to lions, is called a food chain.

From seeds to 'sweetcorn'
Germination : The seed absorbs moisture from the soil and starts to grow.
Lightwards : The shoot grows up, while the roots grow down.
Growth : More roots grow below ground, and more leaves above ground.
Flowering : Finally, the maize plant flowers and then sets seed, producing a new cob of corn.

Tag :plants began

2007-11-29T21:26:00.000+08:00

How do plants drink?
Although plants can absorb a little water through their leaves, they get most of the water they need by drawing it up from the ground through their roots. The roots are in close contact with the particles of soil around them. Tiny rootlets connected to the roots extend into the soil, and these draw in moisture. If you pull up a plant, you can see the delicate white roots, but you cannot see the microscopic rootlets that absorb water. If a plant is pulled up, the rootlets are broken. As soon as they stop working, the plant starts to wilt.

Insect-eating plants
Some plants that grow in poor soil get the nutrients they need by trapping and digesting passing insect. Most produce and attractive scent or glistering drop that look like nectar to lure insect to their doom. Sticky glue or a pool of liquid keeps an insect in the trap while the plant closes and begins to digest it.

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PLANTS LIVE

2007-11-28T13:11:00.000+08:00

Look at trees and other plant, and what colour do you see? The answer, almost always, is various shades of green. That green colour is produced by a chemical called chlorophyll, which is found on the leaves of plants. Chlorophyll is the one of the most important substance on Earth, because it absorbs energy from sunlight, and enables plants to grow. Without it, plants could not survive, and animals would have nothing to eat.

How do plants feed?
Unlike animals, plants do not need to find food. Instead, they make food 'out of thin air' with the help of chlorophyll. The chlorophyll in the plant's leaves absorbs energy from sunshine. The plant then uses this energy to combine water with carbon dioxide, making a sugary food substance called glucose. This process is called photosynthesis. Plants use glucose to grow.They also use it to form sweet-tasting fruits, and to make nectar, syrupy liquid that attracts insects to flowers. Any spare sugar is stored in the plant's seeds or roots.
Light is essential for plants, because they cannot make glucose without it. This is why they grow towards the light. If a plant is shut up in a dark place, it turns pale because its chlorophyll breaks down, and eventually it dies.

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2007-11-27T21:28:00.000+08:00

The mouse's whiskers
Most fungi release spores into the air. These fly about and, if they settle in the right place, grow into new fungi. One fungus is much more cunning about spreading its spores. It grows on mouse dropping, and produces spores with long, upright threads attached. These stand up in the air and catch on the whiskers of passing mice, where they stick fast and are carried off. Later the mouse washes its face and swallows the spores, which travel right through its stomach and intestines. When the mouse next leaves dropping, the spores are there, ready to start growing.

Fungal giants
One of the largest toadstools ever found was an example for an edible kind called Polyporus frondosus. It weighed 33 kg (72 lb). Fungi on living trees can grow even larger. One in the United States measured 142 cm (56 in) across and weighed at least 140 kg (300 lb).

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2007-11-27T13:37:00.000+08:00

Are toadstools poisonous?
Some toadstools are very poisonous. You would only have to touch them and lick your fingers for them to make you ill. People have died from eating just a few of them. In 1534, Pope Clement was killed by the death cap toadstools, the world most poisonous fungus. The are many delicious wild fungi, but you need to be an expert to distinguish them from the poisonous ones.

The death cap grows in woodland in Europe and North America. Some edible fungi look quite like it.

Tag :poisonous toadstools

2007-11-26T21:25:00.000+08:00

Kind of fungus

Truffle is a delicious fungus lives underground on the roots of oak trees.
Honey fungus is an enemy of trees, this fungus feeds on living and dead wood. If you see a cluster of honey fungi near a tree, you can be sure that the tree is either dead or about to die.
Jelly antler grows on the ground, sprouting from old pieces of rotting wood.
Fly agaric is a beautiful but highly poisonous, this brilliantly coloured fungus usually lives close to birch or spruce trees.
Red cage fungus is about the size of a golf ball. The inside of the 'cage' contains slimy spores that are spread by flies.
Lemon disc fungus feeds on dead wood, growing in dense cluster on old fallen branches.
Oyster fungus is a edible fungus grows on dead or dying trees.

Tag :fungus kinds

2007-11-26T11:29:00.000+08:00

Attacks by fungi
In Australia koalas can become infected with different kinds of fungi. One of the fungi is associated with certain types of eucalyptus tree, the trees that koalas lived in and feed on. The fungi are not passes from one koala to another, and most healthy koalas are not killed by them. Koalas are not the only victims of fungi. A fungus carried around by beetles, for example, caused the Dutch elm disease that wiped out many of Britain's elm tree in the 1970s.

Why does bread go mouldy?
Bread is an ideal food for many fungi. Their spores are everywhere in the air, and as soon as you take out a loaf of bread, some mould spores fall on it. Long before you see any furry mould on the bread, moulds are growing but, in small amounts, they do us no harm.

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MUSHROOMS AND TOADSTOOLS

2007-11-25T23:04:00.000+08:00

People often think that living things are either plants or animals. But there are many other kinds of life. Some are tiny creatures such as bacteria. Others, called fungi, can look like plants, but grow by absorbing food instead of by using sunlight. Fungi spread by scattering spores, dust-like particles much simpler than seeds.

Forest fungi
Forest are good places to find fungi, because many fungi feed on wood or on fallen leaves. Some, like the red-and-white fly agaric, are useful to trees because they help them to collect nutrients from the soil. Others, like the honey fungus, are much less welcome because they attack living wood.

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2007-11-25T15:34:00.000+08:00

Deadly bite
Malaria is caused by single-celled parasites that are carried by mosquito. When an infected mosquito bites a person, some of the parasites get into the blood, feed inside red blood cells and attack the liver.

Rotifers
Rotifers are related to roundworms (nematodes), even though they look nothing like worms. There are 2000 different species, mostly living in ponds or on wet mosses in woodlands.

Heliozoans
Heliozoans have spiky skeletons. They live mainly in ponds and lakes. The spikes are made of silica, the same substance that makes glass.

Daphnia
Daphnia are related to crabs and shrimps. They can just be seen with the naked eye, but you need a microscope to see their structure. They are transparent, so you can watch their stomach digesting food and all the other internal organs. They swim by beating their brush-like antennae.

2007-11-24T21:19:00.000+08:00

The nature of microscopic

Paramecium
This single-called creature is called a ciliate because it is covered with tiny hairs known as cilia, which push it through the water.

Euglena
Euglena moves around by beating a hair-like growth called a flagellum. It lives like a plant, by harnessing energy from sunshine.

Vorticella
Each vorticella consists of a single cell with a cup on a long stalk. Tiny breathing hairs (cilia) drive food particles into the centre of the 'cup', where they are absorbed.

Invisible occupant
This dust mite, a tiny relative of spiders, is magnified around 375 times. It collects food with microscopic picers, and usually feeds at night.

Cyclops
Cyclops are microscopic relatives of crabs and shrimps. They get their name from the fact that they have only one eye, like the Cyclops of Greek legend. The two little bags attached to either side of this animal's tail contain eggs.

Next, continue the microscopic kind

2007-11-24T07:16:00.000+08:00

The microscopic world that feeds the whales
Blue whales feed on very small animals called krill, using their huge sieve-like mouth to catch thousands at a time. The krill feed on microscopic animals and plants called plankton that float in the upper layers of the ocean. So blue whales, which are the largest living creatures in the world, are directly dependent on some of the smallest creatures for their food.

After this, find out about kinds of microscopic

2007-11-23T23:17:00.000+08:00

What is the smallest living thing?
The smallest living things are viruses. They are like car engines without any wheels or bodywork attached, they have no way of moving around and no cell wall, unlike other living thing. Viruses do not even have any way of reproducing themselves. In order to produce more viruses, they have to invade other cells and take them over. This is why viruses cause diseases. When you catch a cold, the cells in your nose have been taken over by viruses so that they can reproduced themselves.

How to live on leaves
Animal such as deer and horses have bacteria in their digestive systems that allow them to digest grass and leaves. Our ancestors once had these bacteria too, and attached to your intestine is an 'appendix'. This empty pocket is all that remains of the large structure which aonce held leaf-digesting bacteria.

2007-11-23T14:49:00.000+08:00

What tiny creatures share your home?
If you think your house just belongs to you and your family, think again. As well as flies, spiders and woodlice, there are many microscopic animals and plants living with you. No matter how clean your house is, the carpets, armchairs and mattresses are probably full of tiny animals called house dust mits. These feed on the flakes of skin that you shed every day. Before the mite get to them, these bits of skin provide food for microscopic moulds, and the mites eat the moulds along with the skin. As long as you are not allergic to moulds or dust mites, neither will do you any harm.

Unseen in the pond
A drop of pond water can be full of the most astonishing animals and plants, visible only with a microscope.

THE LIFE OF MICROSCOPIC

2007-11-22T19:37:00.000+08:00

A huge part of the living world is too small to be seen except under a microscope, which magnifies everything tens or even thousands of time. Some of these microscopic creatures are harmful to us, causing diseases or making food rot. Others are useful, such as the yeast that help us make bread, and the bacteria that make yogurt and cheese.

What's living on you?
In the wild, most animals have fleas, lice and other small parasites living on their bodies. The same was true of our ancestors. A large, warm-blooded creature such as a human being is like a walking restaurant to smaller forms of life, and the meals are all free. Today we use soap and water to get rid of these small parasites from our bodies and our clothes, and if all else fails we use chemicals to kill them. But there are many microscopic creature sharing our lives that we do not even know about. Most of them do us no harm at all. Some are even beneficial, such as a bacteria which live on our skins and in our intestines.

2007-11-22T08:18:00.001+08:00

What is coal?
Coal is just old wood, twigs and leaves. It began as forests, which grew in swampy land more than 300 million years ago. When the trees died they fell into the swamp water, which prevented them from breaking down properly. They turned into peat, a soft brown substance. The huge pressure of rock layers building up above turned the peat into coal.

Prehistoric plants
Animals are not the only things that can turn into fossils. Coal sometimes contains the fossilised bark and leaves of giant ferns and clubmosses, trees that grew in swampy forests more than 300 million years ago.

Tracks through time
Animal footprints can be preserved in the rocks, and so can insect trails or even the traces left on the seabed by worms and jellyfish. However, these small, delicate structures can only be preserved in rock that originally comes from mud or sand.

2007-11-21T15:16:00.000+08:00

Fossils within fossils
Sometimes, a fossil animal is found with another fossil animal inside it. The larger animal may have been pregnant with young at the time it died, in which case the animal inside is an unborn baby animal. In other cases, the animal inside was eaten by the larger animal just before the larger animal died, and become fossilised with it.

Do dead animal always turn into fossils?
When animal die, the bone are usually chewed by other, scavenging animals, scattered by the rain and wind, or bleached broken down to dust by the Sun. For this reason, the bones of most animals that have ever lived, nomore than one in a million has survived as a fossil. Fossil form only when a dead animal is buried quickly by sediments, before there is a chance for the bones to be destroyed. When this happen, the bones are locked up in the sediment as it slowly turns to rock. The bones themselves also turn to rock in the process, but they keep their shape. Millions of years later, erosion strips away the layer of rock and exposes the fossil.

2007-11-21T08:37:00.000+08:00

Four fossils form
1. Cover up :
The dinosaur lies on the mud in shallow water, which keeps scavenging animal away.

2. Rot set in :
Sediment starts to settle on the dinosaurs body. Meanwhile, bacteria attack the body's soft
parts, making them rot away.

3. Dead and buried :
After hundreds of years, the bones are safely buried beneath the surface. Water
seeps into the bones, leaving behind minerals that help to turn the bones into fossils.

4. Finished fossil :
As a sediment piles up, pressure grows. After thousands of years, this turns the sediment
and fossils into rock.

What are the best places to find fossils?
Fossils are found in rocks such as chalk, limestone, sandstone and shale. These were formed long ago by sediments building up on the seabed or at the bottoms of lakes. They are called 'sedimentary rocks' Rocks form by volcanic action, such as granite and basalt, do not contain fossils. You can find fossils where sedimentary rocks are being cut away by erosion, such as in sea cliffs or river gorges.

FOSSIL TRAILS

2007-11-20T15:21:00.000+08:00

No one has ever seen a tyrannosaurus, or any other dinosaur, but we know a lot about them. Almost all our knowledge about prehistoric animal comes from fossils, which are rock-like 'model' of the bones of animals. The bone themselves were buried in layers of mud or sand, millions of years ago, and then slowly turned to rock themselves by a natural chemical process. Very rarely, softer parts of the body such as skin, feathers and fur also become fossilised, giving many useful clues about life in the past.

How fossils form?
If a dinosaur dies beside a lake and falls into the shallow water, it has a very good chance of slowly turning into a fossil. The dinosaur's body is slowly covered by muddy sediment. Its skin and flesh start to rot away, leaving just the bare bones are completely covered up, they do not break down any more. Instead, they are slowly fossilised, or turned into rock.

2007-11-19T14:49:00.000+08:00

Why do some animals become extinct?
Some creatures die out, or become extinct, while others flourish. This is part of the process of evolution. Successful species move into new areas, or start eating new food, or adapt to a change in climate, and so evolve into new forms. The extinctions make space for new species to emerge. Human activities such as forest clearance, building and road-making, which are not part of a natural process, are now also causing extinctions, too quickly for evolution to fill the gaps. We are now losing thousands of species every day, and they are not being replaced.

2007-11-18T23:21:00.000+08:00

Why does a pangolin look like an armadillo?
Sometimes animals that live in the same way and eat much the same food evolve to look like each other, even though they are not closely related. The armadillo's main diet is ants and termites, which it digs out of the ground with powerful claws. It has a long snout for nosing around in the ground after insects, and thick plates of bone protecting its skin from the ants painful stings. This bony armour also gives it protection from predators out on the open plains where the ant nests are found. Armadillos live only in the Americas, but in Africa there are animals called pangolins that look remarkable similar. They, too, live out on the plains and feed mainly on termites and ants. The pangolins and armadillos are not related, but because they live the same kind of life, they have evolved along similar lines. This is called convergent evolution.

2007-11-17T22:40:00.000+08:00

Why do animals evolve?
Evolution has produced all the creatures found on Earth. The evidence for this comes from fossils, and from comparing the structure and chemistry of living creatures. But what makes evolution happen? Scientists believe that the answer is something called 'natural selection'. All animals and plants produce more young than can possibly survive. Some die, while others go on to produce young of their own. In general, the one that are best suited to their environment survive, while the weakest die out. Because the best adapted survive and are most likely to pass on their genes to the next generation, the species gradually becomes more suited to its environment.

2007-11-17T15:41:00.000+08:00

The evolution of the horse
Horse belong to a family of animals 50 million years old. The earliest ancestor of the horse. called Hyracotherium, was a size of the dog, and had four-toed feet. Its descendants grew bigger, and evolved longer legs with fewer toes. Today's horses have just one toe or hoof on each foot.

From tadpole to frog
The ancestors of frog were fish that could pull themselve around using strong, fleshy front fins. About 300 million years ago, these fish gradually started to crawl out onto dry land. Today, frog still re-enact this part of their past, because they start life as todpoles, which swim around by lashing their tails. After a few weeks tadpoles start to lose their tails. They grow legs and take up life on land.

EVOLUTION STORY

2007-11-16T23:05:00.000+08:00

Every living thing on Earth is descended from one common ancestor that lived long ago. We know this because, although living things different genes, they have all inherited the same genetic code to make those genes work. That ancestor was probably a creature similar to a bacterium. But how could a bacterium produce descendants as different as sharks, daisies, cucumbers and camels? Living things slowly change, or evolve. Over millions of years, tiny differences have built up to produce completely new species.

Our tiny ancestors
When dinosaurs were striding about the Earth, our ancestors were there, too, although Tyrannosaurus rex probably never noticed them as they scurried past his toes. They were timid creatures, rather like modern-day shrews but larger. After the dinosaurs died out, these unlikely ancestors began to flourish and gave rise to all the mammals, including ourselves.

Creation Or Evolution?
Is evolution just a theory? You can prove creation.

www.gnmagazine.org/evolution

2007-11-16T10:38:00.000+08:00

Is there life in outer space?
Despite listening very carefully for radio signal, scientists have not found any signs of life in space. But many of them think it likely that life has developed elsewhere. How many other planets might be inhabited? To answer this difficult question, an astronomer devised the equation :
1. Formed a stars in the Milky Way
2. Percentage of these stars form planet
3. Percentage of the planets are suitable for life
4. Percentage of these has life evolved
5. Percentage of these planets have intelligent life
6. Percentage of these can communicate
7. Communicating civilisation last

2007-11-15T23:32:00.000+08:00

Why does the Earth have life?
Several things about planet Earth make it uniquely suite to life. The main one is abundant water. No other planet that we know of has the huge oceans we have, nor the many lakes and rivers. Water is a very important ingredient of all living things because it has many properties that no other substance has. All the important reactions that occur inside our cells require water, and all the organs in our bodies, such as the heart and lungs and liver, rely on being surrounded by water. Without water, life as we know it could not go on. Could there be a completely different kind of life form that is not based on water? Scientists have tried to imagine such life forms, but it is hard to see what could take the place of water.

Oxygen

2007-11-15T17:18:00.000+08:00

Oxygen changes everything
The earliest living things were bacteria, which grew by using chemicals in the sea. When the chemicals started to run out, it became harder for life to survive. Some living thing, called cyanobacteria, found a new way of growing, called photosynthesis. Photosynthesis works by using the energy in sunlight, and it produces oxygen as a waste product. As this new gas began to build up, the Earth's atmosphere changed, creating the kind of air we breathe today.

Oxygen avoiders
Some prehistoric bacteria from the start of life have descendants that we can study. This bacteria cannot tolerate oxygen, because it was not part of Earth's ancient atmosphere. They live in the black mud at the bottom of marshes, or in other places without oxygen. They make food by chemical reactions, and do not rely on sunlight like other living things.

HOW LIFE BEGAN

2007-11-14T22:33:00.000+08:00

How did life on Earth begin?
We can never know for sure, but scientists are certain that it cannot have happened all at once. Instead, they believe that it developed very gradually, through a series of chemical reactions. Scientists test this idea by re-creating the conditions of the early Earth in laboratory experiments. In one experiment, they put a smal amount of water in a glass container, to imitate the sea. Next, they remove all the air above the water, and replace it with the gases they think were in the atmosphere 4 billion years ago. After this, they seal the container, and pass electric sparks through the gases, to imitate lightning flashing through the air. When they open the glass container, they find that the water contains some of the complex chemicals that up living thing. Experiments like these suggest that life could have started quite by acciddent, most probably in the sea.

If you could go back 4 billion years in time, you would find the Earth a very strange place. You would not be able to breathe because the air would be filled with poisonous gases, and you would not be able to eat because there would be no food, and no living things. There would be nothing flying in the sky and nothing swimming in the water. Most of the ground would be bare rock. But in the sea, somewhere, the beginnings of life would be stirring.

INTRODUCTION

2007-11-14T13:16:00.000+08:00

Here is the main topic of the living world :

How life began
Evolution story
Fossil trails
The life of Microscopic
Mushrooms and toadstools (fungi)
Plants live
Plants reproduce
Tree life
Prehistoric animals
Dinosaurs
Moving animals on land and water
Animals in flight
Animal senses
Hunters and hunted
Animal defences
Camouflage and mimicry
Animal homes
Animal behaviour
Surviving extremes
Great animal journeys (migration)
Animal reproduction
Growth and development
Ecology that connecting the living world
Wildlife conservation

Also get the better knowledge of :

The classified of living thing
invertebrates animals
vertebrates animals
Plants and fungi
The new discoveries of endangered species